Four Months Spent Sitting Next to a Large Green Machine

1972.  I am sixteen years old.

My high school classmate Tom stops me as I slouch toward our first class after lunch.  “You look like your dog died,” he said.  “What’s the matter?”

“I hate Rapid Reading,” I say.  “And I’m still in the last chair.” I shift my armload of schoolbooks and sigh, lingering outside the doorway, not ready to go in. Knowing I'll never really be ready but at least I can wait till the bell changs.

Back during the first week of school, Tom and I, along with the rest of the class, were told that the seats in the Rapid Reading classroom would soon be arranged by the students' reading speed.  To determine our starting pace, we students sat in the darkened classroom, staring at a pull-down white screen. As we gazed at a rectangle of light, which shone from a machine on a cart, something that looked like a fancy slide projector, our teacher flashed a series of words and sentences onto the screen.

We sophomores were to copy down any words or letters we had time to read and comprehend.   After the test was given and the classroom lights were flicked back on, each of us handed answer sheets over our shoulders till they reached the students sitting in the front seats of the classroom. Our answer sheets were collected and put in order, fastest reader to slowest, and we were assigned to Rapid Reading desks.

This concrete-block room, painted white but seeming yellowish in the glare of buzzing overhead fluorescent fixtures,  hasn't been well-adapted for current use. Originally designed for twenty-eght students to sit in rows and watch film strips, the smallish space has never been intended for speed-reading technology.  The desks were now wedged tightly around three walls of the classroom and we all sit shoulder to shoulder. The effect is a crowded-school-bus level of companionship, too close for comfort. In front of each of us, an electric reading box, made of industrial green metal with silver accents, sits on a desk. The ATM hasn't been invented yet but that's what the Rapid Reading machines look like; they are as large as wall-mounted automatic teller machines will be in the future.

We students are supposed to put our books flat on the floors of openings in the boxes. Each box has a built-in bar of light which starts at the top of each page and then moves down. The idea is to read the lines as they are lit. A dial setting puts the speed that this light bar moves at the rate where we scored on the comprehension test. Over time, we are supposed to move the dial up so that the light bar moves more quickly and we must try to keep up with it. We are seated by reading speed so we'll know if we are doing well compared to the others in the class. This ranking is supposed to motivate us to adjust our 1-to-10 reading dials to 11 (a la "This Is Spinal Tap") so we can blow past the other slowpokes and move to a seat closer to the pole position.

I am used to this motivational style. It's a factory town, Indianapolis, and the schools are run like factories. Production speed and work quality must always be on the rise.  In seventh grade, we’d all gotten IQ tests and been put us into classes by perceived intelligence, classes labeled A-1 to C-3.  A-1s were the smart people. C-3’s did not actually learn anything, but were used around the junior high to do useful tasks. For instance, it was the C-3s who spread cinders on the running track.

But the pressure to compete had started long before that. Eight years earlier,  my second-grade teacher tried to get the other pupils and I to scramble around on the floor, bloomers showing, and fight over candy after the papeer-mache donkey pinata was broken.  Then when my family moved and I started fourth grade at Lowell Elementary, I'd struggled over damp mimeographed sheets filled with weekly "math races." Kids who came in first, second, and third in solving addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems got blue, silver, or red stars on sheets of construction paper. These award sheets, with our names written neatly on them by the teacher, were posted along the top margins of the classroom walls. I never got any stars, ever, but every week I tried feverishly to get at least one red star. I tried various methods of flipping the mimeo over as soon as the "Go" signal was given, to get a half-second advantage. Never worked.

 Competition was still big when I got to junior high. By that time, I still tried to win but I set my sets lower. In the school orchestra, I had to "challenge" my way from the second violins to the first violins.  The seconds had to play lots of four-measure drone notes while the firsts got to do the melodies. I worked my way up only to the last seat in the first violins, but never got close to becomeing concert mistress. At least I got to play something besides D for eight counts and then G for eight counts, and then D again. Sort of a win.

But today, outside the Rapid Reading room with my buddy Tom, I am in the tenth grade and it's been a quick slide to Loserville over the winter. Here it is March, and I am reading at exactly the same speed as when Rapid Reading began. I hadn't been able to get beyond the last seat of the first violin section in junior high, and here I am now in my sophomore year, still in the same seat in the speed-reading classroom. I'm stuck, stuck for the year and probably stuck for life now.

And I'm bitter too, and for good reason. Of course I haven’t made any progress in the last four months!  I can’t use the darn machine.  The Rapid Reading machine is like a big metal cave into which I'm supposed to insert the open book. The light scanner bar is mounted in the top of the opening and is supposed to move over the pages at the bottom of the access opening.  The problem is that I'm legally blind. I can only read with my left eye, and only in a sort of porthole in the middle of the visual field. My focal length is about four inches, but I can’t put my head into the machine with the book. The opening is wide enough, but not tall enough.  If I put my head in there, my nose would be smashed into the crease between the pages, which is where it sometimes is anyway. When mean kids see me holding my face really close to my book, they smash the book into my face or my face into the book, saying "Think you have that close enough??"

Also, if I put my head inside the machine, the scanner bar would just move uselessly over the back of my head. My noggin is like a permanent eclipse for the Rapid Reading system.

The solution, such as it is, is that I sit at the desk with my assigned machine taking up most of the available space, and I jam the book in at the edge of the machine and just read normally. Well, normally for me. I stoop over the open paperback copy of The Hobbit, the tip of my nose not far from the printed page.  Next to me, the speed-reader, set to the proper pace on the calibrated dial, hums as the bar of light silently moves over the empty tray. Hundreds of invisible unread lines light up one by one during each hour of Rapid Reading.  And this is why I am still in the last desk, with everyone in the overcrowded aware that I am still number 28 out of 28 after four months of everyone else moving their machine settings up and jostling each other out of their seat rankings.

Tom, someone I've been in classes with since Lowell Elementary, knows about how I can't see and can't use the machine. I don't need to explain the situation to him.

Instead, he explains it to me, as the red bell high on the tile wall begins clanging and we are forced to quit stalling and move into the classroom.  “You’re not the last one,” Tom says, as we push our way the Rapid Reading room.  “You’re in the first chair.“  He points to my desk.  “It starts there and goes this way.”  He swings his index finger toward the end of the line, the desk of the kid I’ve believed, for fourth months, is the fastest reader. That kid is actually Number 28, not me. I am Number 1.

No one has ever told me which way the desks were set up; I’ve just assumed I am last.  Faced with the truth, I am relieved to know I am not the slowest reader in the room, but I don't enjoy that session of Rapid Reading, or any of the remaining classes. It always gives me a crick in my neck, because it's hard to get comfortable bending over my worn copy of The Hobbit with the Rapid Reading machine crowding me off my own desk. And I am developing cynicism, the kind from comes from the recognition, at the age of sixteen, that when a new system is put into place (and paid for with scarce Hoosier education dollars), we all have to pretend that the system works no matter what. Nearly-blind person can't use the machine? Make her sit next it and scrunch herself into the actual reading space. School is a factory, and the whole production line can't stop because one person ran out of rivets.

So am old enough to understand that we bend to the system, the system doesn't bend to us, and yet ut as a high school sophomore, I don't have enough worldly experience to ask myself why we are doing Rapid Reading as a system. Many of the students at Warren Central will drop out of high school in the next few months, as soon as they are old enough to get work permits. Why are we all enrolled in speed-reading? Is it to help us get through War and Peace on our half-hour lunch breaks on assembly line jobs? Can't be. Breaks are for smoking, going to the bathroom, and desperately hunting for another binful of rivets before the line starts up again.

I'm also too young to be grateful that I am even allowed to borrow The Hobbit from the school library. If one of the parents were to find out that the book has magic and pagan rituals in it, it would be yanked out from under my nose. But timing and culture are on my side. It's i972, and no one thinks much about J.R.R. Tolkien. The movie version of Mario Puzo's The Godfather has just come out, and car dealers are on television making potential buyers offers they can't refuse. So for the moment I have this tale of elves, hobbits and dwarves to keep me busy until the bell rings for the end of Rapid Reading. If I hurry, I can get another chapter read before Algebra I begins at 2:15.